BERLIN – The Jerusalem Post reports that German public television broadcast a documentary last week about modern antisemitism at the heart of German society. It shows the commonality between anti-Israel legislative initiatives from Green Party and neo-Nazi NPD party. Titled Anti-Semitism Today: How hostile is Germany toward Jews? – it was produced by Ahmad Mansour, an Israeli Arab, and two Germans, Kirsten Esch and Jo Goll. Mansour is a policy advisor to the Brussels-based European Foundation for Democracy. Dr. Monika Schwarz-Friesel, a linguistics professor at the Technical University in Berlin, investigated a combination of 14,000 letters and emails sent to the Israeli embassy and Jewish organizations. The majority came from “so-called mainstream society.” One letter from a man with a doctorate states, “Why are always again the Jews persecuted? You need to ask yourself that.” He added, “By the next Holocaust the whining begins to start again. I am fed up with it.” Dr. Dieter Graumann, the head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, slammed the disparate treatment targeting Israel as “absurd” in the film. With respect to the product labeling, he noted that there are “many different territorial disputes in the world and nowhere else is it [product labeling] done.”

Lithuanian Jews to Get Reparations

JTA reports that the Lithuanian government is granting symbolic reparations to Lithuanian Holocaust survivors. Each survivor will get $622 to compensate for the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation, a parallel which infuriates Jewish groups and survivors, who point to Lithuanian attempts to label Jewish partisans as traitors to Lithuania during the Holocaust. Lithuania is a master of Holocaust obfuscation, “which does not deny a single Jewish death at the hands of the Nazis. Instead, it uses as a starting point the idea that the Nazi genocide was not a unique event but rather a reaction to Soviet “genocide” (and antecedent to further Soviet genocide) in which the same elements of Lithuanian society that often sided with the Nazi invaders were persecuted and imprisoned by the Communist regime, whose officials included Jews.”